but say,
Imperial shadow of the thing I am, _900
When, how, by whom, Destruction must accomplish
Her consummation!
Imperial shadow of the thing I am, _900
When, how, by whom, Destruction must accomplish
Her consummation!
Shelley copy
giants who look pale _425
When the crushed worm rebels beneath your tread,
The vultures and the dogs, your pensioners tame,
Are overgorged; but, like oppressors, still
They crave the relic of Destruction's feast.
The exhalations and the thirsty winds _430
Are sick with blood; the dew is foul with death;
Heaven's light is quenched in slaughter: thus, where'er
Upon your camps, cities, or towers, or fleets,
The obscene birds the reeking remnants cast
Of these dead limbs,--upon your streams and mountains, _435
Upon your fields, your gardens, and your housetops,
Where'er the winds shall creep, or the clouds fly,
Or the dews fall, or the angry sun look down
With poisoned light--Famine, and Pestilence,
And Panic, shall wage war upon our side! _440
Nature from all her boundaries is moved
Against ye: Time has found ye light as foam.
The Earth rebels; and Good and Evil stake
Their empire o'er the unborn world of men
On this one cast;--but ere the die be thrown, _445
The renovated genius of our race,
Proud umpire of the impious game, descends,
A seraph-winged Victory, bestriding
The tempest of the Omnipotence of God,
Which sweeps all things to their appointed doom, _450
And you to oblivion! '--More he would have said,
But--
NOTE:
_384 band edition 1822; bands editions 1839.
MAHMUD:
Died--as thou shouldst ore thy lips had painted
Their ruin in the hues of our success.
A rebel's crime, gilt with a rebel's tongue!
Your heart is Greek, Hassan.
HASSAN:
It may be so: _455
A spirit not my own wrenched me within,
And I have spoken words I fear and hate;
Yet would I die for--
MAHMUD:
Live! oh live! outlive
Me and this sinking empire. But the fleet--
HASSAN:
Alas! --
MAHMUD:
The fleet which, like a flock of clouds _460
Chased by the wind, flies the insurgent banner!
Our winged castles from their merchant ships!
Our myriads before their weak pirate bands!
Our arms before their chains! our years of empire
Before their centuries of servile fear! _465
Death is awake! Repulse is on the waters!
They own no more the thunder-bearing banner
Of Mahmud; but, like hounds of a base breed,
Gorge from a stranger's hand, and rend their master.
NOTE:
_466 Repulse is "Shelley, Errata", edition 1822; Repulsed edition 1822.
HASSAN:
Latmos, and Ampelos, and Phanae saw _470
The wreck--
MAHMUD:
The caves of the Icarian isles
Told each to the other in loud mockery,
And with the tongue as of a thousand echoes,
First of the sea-convulsing fight--and, then,--
Thou darest to speak--senseless are the mountains: _475
Interpret thou their voice!
NOTE:
_472 Told Errata, Wms. transcript; Hold edition 1822.
HASSAN:
My presence bore
A part in that day's shame. The Grecian fleet
Bore down at daybreak from the North, and hung
As multitudinous on the ocean line,
As cranes upon the cloudless Thracian wind. _480
Our squadron, convoying ten thousand men,
Was stretching towards Nauplia when the battle
Was kindled. --
First through the hail of our artillery
The agile Hydriote barks with press of sail _485
Dashed:--ship to ship, cannon to cannon, man
To man were grappled in the embrace of war,
Inextricable but by death or victory.
The tempest of the raging fight convulsed
To its crystalline depths that stainless sea, _490
And shook Heaven's roof of golden morning clouds,
Poised on an hundred azure mountain-isles.
In the brief trances of the artillery
One cry from the destroyed and the destroyer
Rose, and a cloud of desolation wrapped _495
The unforeseen event, till the north wind
Sprung from the sea, lifting the heavy veil
Of battle-smoke--then victory--victory!
For, as we thought, three frigates from Algiers
Bore down from Naxos to our aid, but soon _500
The abhorred cross glimmered behind, before,
Among, around us; and that fatal sign
Dried with its beams the strength in Moslem hearts,
As the sun drinks the dew. --What more? We fled! --
Our noonday path over the sanguine foam _505
Was beaconed,--and the glare struck the sun pale,--
By our consuming transports: the fierce light
Made all the shadows of our sails blood-red,
And every countenance blank. Some ships lay feeding
The ravening fire, even to the water's level; _510
Some were blown up; some, settling heavily,
Sunk; and the shrieks of our companions died
Upon the wind, that bore us fast and far,
Even after they were dead. Nine thousand perished!
We met the vultures legioned in the air _515
Stemming the torrent of the tainted wind;
They, screaming from their cloudy mountain-peaks,
Stooped through the sulphurous battle-smoke and perched
Each on the weltering carcase that we loved,
Like its ill angel or its damned soul, _520
Riding upon the bosom of the sea.
We saw the dog-fish hastening to their feast.
Joy waked the voiceless people of the sea,
And ravening Famine left his ocean cave
To dwell with War, with us, and with Despair. _525
We met night three hours to the west of Patmos,
And with night, tempest--
NOTES:
_503 in edition 1822; of editions 1839.
_527 And edition 1822; As editions 1839.
MAHMUD:
Cease!
[ENTER A MESSENGER. ]
MESSENGER:
Your Sublime Highness,
That Christian hound, the Muscovite Ambassador,
Has left the city. --If the rebel fleet
Had anchored in the port, had victory _530
Crowned the Greek legions in the Hippodrome,
Panic were tamer. --Obedience and Mutiny,
Like giants in contention planet-struck,
Stand gazing on each other. --There is peace
In Stamboul. --
MAHMUD:
Is the grave not calmer still? _535
Its ruins shall be mine.
HASSAN:
Fear not the Russian:
The tiger leagues not with the stag at bay
Against the hunter. --Cunning, base, and cruel,
He crouches, watching till the spoil be won,
And must be paid for his reserve in blood. _540
After the war is fought, yield the sleek Russian
That which thou canst not keep, his deserved portion
Of blood, which shall not flow through streets and fields,
Rivers and seas, like that which we may win,
But stagnate in the veins of Christian slaves! _545
[ENTER SECOND MESSENGER. ]
SECOND MESSENGER:
Nauplia, Tripolizza, Mothon, Athens,
Navarin, Artas, Monembasia,
Corinth, and Thebes are carried by assault,
And every Islamite who made his dogs
Fat with the flesh of Galilean slaves _550
Passed at the edge of the sword: the lust of blood,
Which made our warriors drunk, is quenched in death;
But like a fiery plague breaks out anew
In deeds which make the Christian cause look pale
In its own light. The garrison of Patras _555
Has store but for ten days, nor is there hope
But from the Briton: at once slave and tyrant,
His wishes still are weaker than his fears,
Or he would sell what faith may yet remain
From the oaths broke in Genoa and in Norway; _560
And if you buy him not, your treasury
Is empty even of promises--his own coin.
The freedman of a western poet-chief
Holds Attica with seven thousand rebels,
And has beat back the Pacha of Negropont: _565
The aged Ali sits in Yanina
A crownless metaphor of empire:
His name, that shadow of his withered might,
Holds our besieging army like a spell
In prey to famine, pest, and mutiny; _570
He, bastioned in his citadel, looks forth
Joyless upon the sapphire lake that mirrors
The ruins of the city where he reigned
Childless and sceptreless. The Greek has reaped
The costly harvest his own blood matured, _575
Not the sower, Ali--who has bought a truce
From Ypsilanti with ten camel-loads
Of Indian gold.
NOTE:
_563 freedman edition 1822; freeman editions 1839.
[ENTER A THIRD MESSENGER. ]
MAHMUD:
What more?
THIRD MESSENGER:
The Christian tribes
Of Lebanon and the Syrian wilderness
Are in revolt;--Damascus, Hems, Aleppo _580
Tremble;--the Arab menaces Medina,
The Aethiop has intrenched himself in Sennaar,
And keeps the Egyptian rebel well employed,
Who denies homage, claims investiture
As price of tardy aid. Persia demands _585
The cities on the Tigris, and the Georgians
Refuse their living tribute. Crete and Cyprus,
Like mountain-twins that from each other's veins
Catch the volcano-fire and earthquake-spasm,
Shake in the general fever. Through the city, _590
Like birds before a storm, the Santons shriek,
And prophesyings horrible and new
Are heard among the crowd: that sea of men
Sleeps on the wrecks it made, breathless and still.
A Dervise, learned in the Koran, preaches _595
That it is written how the sins of Islam
Must raise up a destroyer even now.
The Greeks expect a Saviour from the West,
Who shall not come, men say, in clouds and glory,
But in the omnipresence of that Spirit _600
In which all live and are. Ominous signs
Are blazoned broadly on the noonday sky:
One saw a red cross stamped upon the sun;
It has rained blood; and monstrous births declare
The secret wrath of Nature and her Lord. _605
The army encamped upon the Cydaris
Was roused last night by the alarm of battle,
And saw two hosts conflicting in the air,
The shadows doubtless of the unborn time
Cast on the mirror of the night. While yet _610
The fight hung balanced, there arose a storm
Which swept the phantoms from among the stars.
At the third watch the Spirit of the Plague
Was heard abroad flapping among the tents;
Those who relieved watch found the sentinels dead. _615
The last news from the camp is, that a thousand
Have sickened, and--
[ENTER A FOURTH MESSENGER. ]
MAHMUD:
And thou, pale ghost, dim shadow
Of some untimely rumour, speak!
FOURTH MESSENGER:
One comes
Fainting with toil, covered with foam and blood:
He stood, he says, on Chelonites' _620
Promontory, which o'erlooks the isles that groan
Under the Briton's frown, and all their waters
Then trembling in the splendour of the moon,
When as the wandering clouds unveiled or hid
Her boundless light, he saw two adverse fleets _625
Stalk through the night in the horizon's glimmer,
Mingling fierce thunders and sulphureous gleams,
And smoke which strangled every infant wind
That soothed the silver clouds through the deep air.
At length the battle slept, but the Sirocco _630
Awoke, and drove his flock of thunder-clouds
Over the sea-horizon, blotting out
All objects--save that in the faint moon-glimpse
He saw, or dreamed he saw, the Turkish admiral
And two the loftiest of our ships of war, _635
With the bright image of that Queen of Heaven,
Who hid, perhaps, her face for grief, reversed;
And the abhorred cross--
NOTE:
_620 on Chelonites']on Chelonites "Errata";
upon Clelonite's edition 1822;
upon Clelonit's editions 1839.
[ENTER AN ATTENDANT. ]
ATTENDANT:
Your Sublime Highness,
The Jew, who--
MAHMUD:
Could not come more seasonably:
Bid him attend. I'll hear no more! too long _640
We gaze on danger through the mist of fear,
And multiply upon our shattered hopes
The images of ruin. Come what will!
To-morrow and to-morrow are as lamps
Set in our path to light us to the edge _645
Through rough and smooth, nor can we suffer aught
Which He inflicts not in whose hand we are.
[EXEUNT. ]
SEMICHORUS 1:
Would I were the winged cloud
Of a tempest swift and loud!
I would scorn _650
The smile of morn
And the wave where the moonrise is born!
I would leave
The spirits of eve
A shroud for the corpse of the day to weave _655
From other threads than mine!
Bask in the deep blue noon divine.
Who would? Not I.
NOTE:
_657 the deep blue "Errata", Wms. transcript; the blue edition 1822.
SEMICHORUS 2:
Whither to fly?
SEMICHORUS 1:
Where the rocks that gird th' Aegean _660
Echo to the battle paean
Of the free--
I would flee
A tempestuous herald of victory!
My golden rain
For the Grecian slain _665
Should mingle in tears with the bloody main,
And my solemn thunder-knell
Should ring to the world the passing-bell
Of Tyranny! _670
SEMICHORUS 2:
Ah king! wilt thou chain
The rack and the rain?
Wilt thou fetter the lightning and hurricane?
The storms are free,
But we-- _675
CHORUS:
O Slavery! thou frost of the world's prime,
Killing its flowers and leaving its thorns bare!
Thy touch has stamped these limbs with crime,
These brows thy branding garland bear,
But the free heart, the impassive soul _680
Scorn thy control!
SEMICHORUS 1:
Let there be light! said Liberty,
And like sunrise from the sea,
Athens arose! --Around her born,
Shone like mountains in the morn _685
Glorious states;--and are they now
Ashes, wrecks, oblivion?
SEMICHORUS 2:
Go,
Where Thermae and Asopus swallowed
Persia, as the sand does foam:
Deluge upon deluge followed, _690
Discord, Macedon, and Rome:
And lastly thou!
SEMICHORUS 1:
Temples and towers,
Citadels and marts, and they
Who live and die there, have been ours,
And may be thine, and must decay; _695
But Greece and her foundations are
Built below the tide of war,
Based on the crystalline sea
Of thought and its eternity;
Her citizens, imperial spirits, _700
Rule the present from the past,
On all this world of men inherits
Their seal is set.
SEMICHORUS 2:
Hear ye the blast,
Whose Orphic thunder thrilling calls
From ruin her Titanian walls? _705
Whose spirit shakes the sapless bones
Of Slavery? Argos, Corinth, Crete
Hear, and from their mountain thrones
The daemons and the nymphs repeat
The harmony.
SEMICHORUS 1:
I hear! I hear! _710
SEMICHORUS 2:
The world's eyeless charioteer,
Destiny, is hurrying by!
What faith is crushed, what empire bleeds
Beneath her earthquake-footed steeds?
What eagle-winged victory sits _715
At her right hand? what shadow flits
Before? what splendour rolls behind?
Ruin and renovation cry
'Who but We? '
SEMICHORUS 1:
I hear! I hear!
The hiss as of a rushing wind, _720
The roar as of an ocean foaming,
The thunder as of earthquake coming.
I hear! I hear!
The crash as of an empire falling,
The shrieks as of a people calling _725
'Mercy! mercy! '--How they thrill!
Then a shout of 'kill! kill! kill! '
And then a small still voice, thus--
SEMICHORUS 2:
For
Revenge and Wrong bring forth their kind,
The foul cubs like their parents are, _730
Their den is in the guilty mind,
And Conscience feeds them with despair.
NOTE:
_728 For edition 1822, Wms. transcript;
Fear cj. Fleay, Forman, Dowden. See Editor's Note.
SEMICHORUS 1:
In sacred Athens, near the fane
Of Wisdom, Pity's altar stood:
Serve not the unknown God in vain. _735
But pay that broken shrine again,
Love for hate and tears for blood.
[ENTER MAHMUD AND AHASUERUS. ]
MAHMUD:
Thou art a man, thou sayest, even as we.
AHASUERUS:
No more!
MAHMUD:
But raised above thy fellow-men
By thought, as I by power.
AHASUERUS:
Thou sayest so. _740
MAHMUD:
Thou art an adept in the difficult lore
Of Greek and Frank philosophy; thou numberest
The flowers, and thou measurest the stars;
Thou severest element from element;
Thy spirit is present in the Past, and sees _745
The birth of this old world through all its cycles
Of desolation and of loveliness,
And when man was not, and how man became
The monarch and the slave of this low sphere,
And all its narrow circles--it is much-- _750
I honour thee, and would be what thou art
Were I not what I am; but the unborn hour,
Cradled in fear and hope, conflicting storms,
Who shall unveil? Nor thou, nor I, nor any
Mighty or wise. I apprehended not _755
What thou hast taught me, but I now perceive
That thou art no interpreter of dreams;
Thou dost not own that art, device, or God,
Can make the Future present--let it come!
Moreover thou disdainest us and ours; _760
Thou art as God, whom thou contemplatest.
AHASUERUS:
Disdain thee? --not the worm beneath thy feet!
The Fathomless has care for meaner things
Than thou canst dream, and has made pride for those
Who would be what they may not, or would seem _765
That which they are not. Sultan! talk no more
Of thee and me, the Future and the Past;
But look on that which cannot change--the One,
The unborn and the undying. Earth and ocean,
Space, and the isles of life or light that gem _770
The sapphire floods of interstellar air,
This firmament pavilioned upon chaos,
With all its cressets of immortal fire,
Whose outwall, bastioned impregnably
Against the escape of boldest thoughts, repels them _775
As Calpe the Atlantic clouds--this Whole
Of suns, and worlds, and men, and beasts, and flowers,
With all the silent or tempestuous workings
By which they have been, are, or cease to be,
Is but a vision;--all that it inherits _780
Are motes of a sick eye, bubbles and dreams;
Thought is its cradle and its grave, nor less
The Future and the Past are idle shadows
Of thought's eternal flight--they have no being:
Nought is but that which feels itself to be. _785
NOTE:
_762 thy edition 1822; my editions 1839.
MAHMUD:
What meanest thou? Thy words stream like a tempest
Of dazzling mist within my brain--they shake
The earth on which I stand, and hang like night
On Heaven above me. What can they avail?
They cast on all things surest, brightest, best, _790
Doubt, insecurity, astonishment.
AHASUERUS:
Mistake me not! All is contained in each.
Dodona's forest to an acorn's cup
Is that which has been, or will be, to that
Which is--the absent to the present. Thought _795
Alone, and its quick elements, Will, Passion,
Reason, Imagination, cannot die;
They are, what that which they regard appears,
The stuff whence mutability can weave
All that it hath dominion o'er, worlds, worms, _800
Empires, and superstitions. What has thought
To do with time, or place, or circumstance?
Wouldst thou behold the Future? --ask and have!
Knock and it shall be opened--look, and lo!
The coming age is shadowed on the Past _805
As on a glass.
MAHMUD:
Wild, wilder thoughts convulse
My spirit--Did not Mahomet the Second
Win Stamboul?
AHASUERUS:
Thou wouldst ask that giant spirit
The written fortunes of thy house and faith.
Thou wouldst cite one out of the grave to tell _810
How what was born in blood must die.
MAHMUD:
Thy words
Have power on me! I see--
AHASUERUS:
What hearest thou?
MAHMUD:
A far whisper--
Terrible silence.
AHASUERUS:
What succeeds?
MAHMUD:
The sound
As of the assault of an imperial city, _815
The hiss of inextinguishable fire,
The roar of giant cannon; the earthquaking
Fall of vast bastions and precipitous towers,
The shock of crags shot from strange enginery,
The clash of wheels, and clang of armed hoofs, _820
And crash of brazen mail as of the wreck
Of adamantine mountains--the mad blast
Of trumpets, and the neigh of raging steeds,
The shrieks of women whose thrill jars the blood,
And one sweet laugh, most horrible to hear, _825
As of a joyous infant waked and playing
With its dead mother's breast, and now more loud
The mingled battle-cry,--ha! hear I not
'En touto nike! ' 'Allah-illa-Allah! '?
AHASUERUS:
The sulphurous mist is raised--thou seest--
MAHMUD:
A chasm, _830
As of two mountains in the wall of Stamboul;
And in that ghastly breach the Islamites,
Like giants on the ruins of a world,
Stand in the light of sunrise. In the dust
Glimmers a kingless diadem, and one _835
Of regal port has cast himself beneath
The stream of war. Another proudly clad
In golden arms spurs a Tartarian barb
Into the gap, and with his iron mace
Directs the torrent of that tide of men, _840
And seems--he is--Mahomet!
AHASUERUS:
What thou seest
Is but the ghost of thy forgotten dream.
A dream itself, yet less, perhaps, than that
Thou call'st reality. Thou mayst behold
How cities, on which Empire sleeps enthroned, _845
Bow their towered crests to mutability.
Poised by the flood, e'en on the height thou holdest,
Thou mayst now learn how the full tide of power
Ebbs to its depths. --Inheritor of glory,
Conceived in darkness, born in blood, and nourished _850
With tears and toil, thou seest the mortal throes
Of that whose birth was but the same. The Past
Now stands before thee like an Incarnation
Of the To-come; yet wouldst thou commune with
That portion of thyself which was ere thou _855
Didst start for this brief race whose crown is death,
Dissolve with that strong faith and fervent passion
Which called it from the uncreated deep,
Yon cloud of war, with its tempestuous phantoms
Of raging death; and draw with mighty will _860
The imperial shade hither.
[EXIT AHASUERUS. ]
[THE PHANTOM OF MAHOMET THE SECOND APPEARS. ]
MAHMUD:
Approach!
PHANTOM:
I come
Thence whither thou must go! The grave is fitter
To take the living than give up the dead;
Yet has thy faith prevailed, and I am here.
The heavy fragments of the power which fell _865
When I arose, like shapeless crags and clouds,
Hang round my throne on the abyss, and voices
Of strange lament soothe my supreme repose,
Wailing for glory never to return. --
A later Empire nods in its decay: _870
The autumn of a greener faith is come,
And wolfish change, like winter, howls to strip
The foliage in which Fame, the eagle, built
Her aerie, while Dominion whelped below.
The storm is in its branches, and the frost _875
Is on its leaves, and the blank deep expects
Oblivion on oblivion, spoil on spoil,
Ruin on ruin:--Thou art slow, my son;
The Anarchs of the world of darkness keep
A throne for thee, round which thine empire lies _880
Boundless and mute; and for thy subjects thou,
Like us, shalt rule the ghosts of murdered life,
The phantoms of the powers who rule thee now--
Mutinous passions, and conflicting fears,
And hopes that sate themselves on dust, and die! -- _885
Stripped of their mortal strength, as thou of thine.
Islam must fall, but we will reign together
Over its ruins in the world of death:--
And if the trunk be dry, yet shall the seed
Unfold itself even in the shape of that _890
Which gathers birth in its decay. Woe! woe!
To the weak people tangled in the grasp
Of its last spasms.
MAHMUD:
Spirit, woe to all!
Woe to the wronged and the avenger! Woe
To the destroyer, woe to the destroyed! _895
Woe to the dupe, and woe to the deceiver!
Woe to the oppressed, and woe to the oppressor!
Woe both to those that suffer and inflict;
Those who are born and those who die!
but say,
Imperial shadow of the thing I am, _900
When, how, by whom, Destruction must accomplish
Her consummation!
PHANTOM:
Ask the cold pale Hour,
Rich in reversion of impending death,
When HE shall fall upon whose ripe gray hairs
Sit Care, and Sorrow, and Infirmity-- _905
The weight which Crime, whose wings are plumed with years,
Leaves in his flight from ravaged heart to heart
Over the heads of men, under which burthen
They bow themselves unto the grave: fond wretch!
He leans upon his crutch, and talks of years _910
To come, and how in hours of youth renewed
He will renew lost joys, and--
VOICE WITHOUT:
Victory! Victory!
[THE PHANTOM VANISHES. ]
MAHMUD:
What sound of the importunate earth has broken
My mighty trance?
VOICE WITHOUT:
Victory! Victory!
MAHMUD:
Weak lightning before darkness! poor faint smile _915
Of dying Islam! Voice which art the response
Of hollow weakness! Do I wake and live?
Were there such things, or may the unquiet brain,
Vexed by the wise mad talk of the old Jew,
Have shaped itself these shadows of its fear? _920
It matters not! --for nought we see or dream,
Possess, or lose, or grasp at, can be worth
More than it gives or teaches. Come what may,
The Future must become the Past, and I
As they were to whom once this present hour, _925
This gloomy crag of time to which I cling,
Seemed an Elysian isle of peace and joy
Never to be attained. --I must rebuke
This drunkenness of triumph ere it die,
And dying, bring despair. Victory! poor slaves! _930
[EXIT MAHMUD. ]
VOICE WITHOUT:
Shout in the jubilee of death! The Greeks
Are as a brood of lions in the net
Round which the kingly hunters of the earth
Stand smiling. Anarchs, ye whose daily food
Are curses, groans, and gold, the fruit of death, _935
From Thule to the girdle of the world,
Come, feast! the board groans with the flesh of men;
The cup is foaming with a nation's blood,
Famine and Thirst await! eat, drink, and die!
SEMICHORUS 1:
Victorious Wrong, with vulture scream, _940
Salutes the rising sun, pursues the flying day!
I saw her, ghastly as a tyrant's dream,
Perch on the trembling pyramid of night,
Beneath which earth and all her realms pavilioned lay
In visions of the dawning undelight. _945
Who shall impede her flight?
Who rob her of her prey?
VOICE WITHOUT:
Victory! Victory! Russia's famished eagles
Dare not to prey beneath the crescent's light.
Impale the remnant of the Greeks! despoil! _950
Violate! make their flesh cheaper than dust!
SEMICHORUS 2:
Thou voice which art
The herald of the ill in splendour hid!
Thou echo of the hollow heart
Of monarchy, bear me to thine abode _955
When desolation flashes o'er a world destroyed:
Oh, bear me to those isles of jagged cloud
Which float like mountains on the earthquake, mid
The momentary oceans of the lightning,
Or to some toppling promontory proud _960
Of solid tempest whose black pyramid,
Riven, overhangs the founts intensely bright'ning
Of those dawn-tinted deluges of fire
Before their waves expire,
When heaven and earth are light, and only light _965
In the thunder-night!
NOTE:
_958 earthquake edition 1822; earthquakes editions 1839.
VOICE WITHOUT:
Victory! Victory! Austria, Russia, England,
And that tame serpent, that poor shadow, France,
Cry peace, and that means death when monarchs speak.
Ho, there! bring torches, sharpen those red stakes, _970
These chains are light, fitter for slaves and poisoners
Than Greeks. Kill! plunder! burn! let none remain.
SEMICHORUS 1:
Alas! for Liberty!
If numbers, wealth, or unfulfilling years,
Or fate, can quell the free! _975
Alas! for Virtue, when
Torments, or contumely, or the sneers
Of erring judging men
Can break the heart where it abides.
Alas! if Love, whose smile makes this obscure world splendid, _980
Can change with its false times and tides,
Like hope and terror,--
Alas for Love!
And Truth, who wanderest lone and unbefriended,
If thou canst veil thy lie-consuming mirror _985
Before the dazzled eyes of Error,
Alas for thee! Image of the Above.
SEMICHORUS 2:
Repulse, with plumes from conquest torn,
Led the ten thousand from the limits of the morn
Through many an hostile Anarchy! _990
At length they wept aloud, and cried, 'The Sea! the Sea! '
Through exile, persecution, and despair,
Rome was, and young Atlantis shall become
The wonder, or the terror, or the tomb
Of all whose step wakes Power lulled in her savage lair: _995
But Greece was as a hermit-child,
Whose fairest thoughts and limbs were built
To woman's growth, by dreams so mild,
She knew not pain or guilt;
And now, O Victory, blush! and Empire, tremble _1000
When ye desert the free--
If Greece must be
A wreck, yet shall its fragments reassemble,
And build themselves again impregnably
In a diviner clime, _1005
To Amphionic music on some Cape sublime,
Which frowns above the idle foam of Time.
SEMICHORUS 1:
Let the tyrants rule the desert they have made;
Let the free possess the Paradise they claim;
Be the fortune of our fierce oppressors weighed _1010
With our ruin, our resistance, and our name!
SEMICHORUS 2:
Our dead shall be the seed of their decay,
Our survivors be the shadow of their pride,
Our adversity a dream to pass away--
Their dishonour a remembrance to abide! _1015
VOICE WITHOUT:
Victory! Victory! The bought Briton sends
The keys of ocean to the Islamite. --
Now shall the blazon of the cross be veiled,
And British skill directing Othman might,
Thunder-strike rebel victory. Oh, keep holy _1020
This jubilee of unrevenged blood!
Kill! crush! despoil! Let not a Greek escape!
SEMICHORUS 1:
Darkness has dawned in the East
On the noon of time:
The death-birds descend to their feast _1025
From the hungry clime.
Let Freedom and Peace flee far
To a sunnier strand,
And follow Love's folding-star
To the Evening land! _1030
SEMICHORUS 2:
The young moon has fed
Her exhausted horn
With the sunset's fire:
The weak day is dead,
But the night is not born; _1035
And, like loveliness panting with wild desire
While it trembles with fear and delight,
Hesperus flies from awakening night,
And pants in its beauty and speed with light
Fast-flashing, soft, and bright. _1040
Thou beacon of love! thou lamp of the free!
Guide us far, far away,
To climes where now veiled by the ardour of day
Thou art hidden
From waves on which weary Noon _1045
Faints in her summer swoon,
Between kingless continents sinless as Eden,
Around mountains and islands inviolably
Pranked on the sapphire sea.
SEMICHORUS 1:
Through the sunset of hope, _1050
Like the shapes of a dream.
What Paradise islands of glory gleam!
Beneath Heaven's cope,
Their shadows more clear float by--
The sound of their oceans, the light of their sky, _1055
The music and fragrance their solitudes breathe
Burst, like morning on dream, or like Heaven on death,
Through the walls of our prison;
And Greece, which was dead, is arisen!
NOTE:
_1057 dream edition 1822; dreams editions 1839.
CHORUS:
The world's great age begins anew, _1060
The golden years return,
The earth doth like a snake renew
Her winter weeds outworn:
Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam,
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream. _1065
A brighter Hellas rears its mountains
From waves serener far;
A new Peneus rolls his fountains
Against the morning star.
Where fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep _1070
Young Cyclads on a sunnier deep.
A loftier Argo cleaves the main,
Fraught with a later prize;
Another Orpheus sings again,
And loves, and weeps, and dies. _1075
A new Ulysses leaves once more
Calypso for his native shore.
Oh, write no more the tale of Troy,
If earth Death's scroll must be!
Nor mix with Laian rage the joy _1080
Which dawns upon the free:
Although a subtler Sphinx renew
Riddles of death Thebes never knew.
Another Athens shall arise,
And to remoter time _1085
Bequeath, like sunset to the skies,
The splendour of its prime;
And leave, if nought so bright may live,
All earth can take or Heaven can give.
Saturn and Love their long repose _1090
Shall burst, more bright and good
Than all who fell, than One who rose,
Than many unsubdued:
Not gold, not blood, their altar dowers,
But votive tears and symbol flowers. _1095
Oh, cease! must hate and death return?
Cease! must men kill and die?
Cease! drain not to its dregs the urn
Of bitter prophecy.
The world is weary of the past, _1100
Oh, might it die or rest at last!
NOTES:
_1068 his edition 1822; its editions 1839.
_1072 Argo]Argos edition 1822.
_1091-_1093 See Editor's note.
_1091 bright editions 1839; wise edition 1829 (ed. Galignani).
_1093 unsubdued editions 1839; unwithstood edition 1829 (ed. Galignani).
NOTES.
(1) THE QUENCHLESS ASHES OF MILAN [L. 60].
Milan was the centre of the resistance of the Lombard league against
the Austrian tyrant. Frederic Barbarossa burnt the city to the ground,
but liberty lived in its ashes, and it rose like an exhalation from
its ruin. See Sismondi's "Histoire des Republiques Italiennes", a book
which has done much towards awakening the Italians to an imitation of
their great ancestors.
(2) THE CHORUS [L. 197].
The popular notions of Christianity are represented in this chorus as
true in their relation to the worship they superseded, and that which
in all probability they will supersede, without considering their
merits in a relation more universal. The first stanza contrasts the
immortality of the living and thinking beings which inhabit the
planets, and to use a common and inadequate phrase, "clothe themselves
in matter", with the transience of the noblest manifestations of the
external world.
The concluding verses indicate a progressive state of more or loss
exalted existence, according to the degree of perfection which every
distinct intelligence may have attained. Let it not be supposed that I
mean to dogmatise upon a subject, concerning which all men are equally
ignorant, or that I think the Gordian knot of the origin of evil can
be disentangled by that or any similar assertions. The received
hypothesis of a Being resembling men in the moral attributes of His
nature, having called us out of non-existence, and after inflicting on
us the misery of the commission of error, should superadd that of the
punishment and the privations consequent upon it, still would remain
inexplicable and incredible. That there is a true solution of the
riddle, and that in our present state that solution is unattainable by
us, are propositions which may be regarded as equally certain:
meanwhile, as it is the province of the poet to attach himself to
those ideas which exalt and ennoble humanity, let him be permitted to
have conjectured the condition of that futurity towards which we are
all impelled by an inextinguishable thirst for immortality. Until
better arguments can be produced than sophisms which disgrace the
cause, this desire itself must remain the strongest and the only
presumption that eternity is the inheritance of every thinking being.
(3) NO HOARY PRIESTS AFTER THAT PATRIARCH [L. 245].
The Greek Patriarch, after haying been compelled to fulminate an
anathema against the insurgents, was put to death by the Turks.
Fortunately the Greeks have been taught that they cannot buy security
by degradation, and the Turks, though equally cruel, are less cunning
than the smooth-faced tyrants of Europe. As to the anathema, his
Holiness might as well have thrown his mitre at Mount Athos for any
effect that it produced. The chiefs of the Greeks are almost all men
of comprehension and enlightened views on religion and politics.
(4) THE FREEDMAN OF A WESTERN POET-CHIEF [L. 563].
A Greek who had been Lord Byron's servant commands the insurgents in
Attica. This Greek, Lord Byron informs me, though a poet and an
enthusiastic patriot, gave him rather the idea of a timid and
unenterprising person. It appears that circumstances make men what
they are, and that we all contain the germ of a degree of degradation
or of greatness whose connection with our character is determined by
events.
(5) THE GREEKS EXPECT A SAVIOUR FROM THE WEST [L. 598].
It is reported that this Messiah had arrived at a seaport near
Lacedaemon in an American brig. The association of names and ideas is
irresistibly ludicrous, but the prevalence of such a rumour strongly
marks the state of popular enthusiasm in Greece.
(6) THE SOUND AS OF THE ASSAULT OF AN IMPERIAL CITY [LL. 814-15].
For the vision of Mahmud of the taking of Constantinople in 1453, see
Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", volume 12 page 223.
The manner of the invocation of the spirit of Mahomet the Second will
be censured as over subtle. I could easily have made the Jew a regular
conjuror, and the Phantom an ordinary ghost. I have preferred to
represent the Jew as disclaiming all pretension, or even belief, in
supernatural agency, and as tempting Mahmud to that state of mind in
which ideas may be supposed to assume the force of sensations through
the confusion of thought with the objects of thought, and the excess
of passion animating the creations of imagination.
It is a sort of natural magic, susceptible of being exercised in a
degree by any one who should have made himself master of the secret
associations of another's thoughts.
(7) THE CHORUS [L. 1060].
The final chorus is indistinct and obscure, as the event of the living
drama whose arrival it foretells. Prophecies of wars, and rumours of
wars, etc. , may safely be made by poet or prophet in any age, but to
anticipate however darkly a period of regeneration and happiness is a
more hazardous exercise of the faculty which bards possess or feign.
It will remind the reader 'magno NEC proximus intervallo' of Isaiah
and Virgil, whose ardent spirits overleaping the actual reign of evil
which we endure and bewail, already saw the possible and perhaps
approaching state of society in which the 'lion shall lie down with
the lamb,' and 'omnis feret omnia tellus. ' Let these great names be my
authority and my excuse.
(8) SATURN AND LOVE THEIR LONG REPOSE SHALL BURST [L. 1090].
Saturn and Love were among the deities of a real or imaginary state of
innocence and happiness. ALL those WHO FELL, or the Gods of Greece,
Asia, and Egypt; the ONE WHO ROSE, or Jesus Christ, at whose
appearance the idols of the Pagan World wore amerced of their worship;
and the MANY UNSUBDUED, or the monstrous objects of the idolatry of
China, India, the Antarctic islands, and the native tribes of America,
certainly have reigned over the understandings of men in conjunction
or in succession, during periods in which all we know of evil has been
in a state of portentous, and, until the revival of learning and the
arts, perpetually increasing, activity. The Grecian gods seem indeed
to have been personally more innocent, although it cannot be said,
that as far as temperance and chastity are concerned, they gave so
edifying an example as their successor. The sublime human character of
Jesus Christ was deformed by an imputed identification with a Power,
who tempted, betrayed, and punished the innocent beings who were
called into existence by His sole will; and for the period of a
thousand years, the spirit of this most just, wise, and benevolent of
men has been propitiated with myriads of hecatombs of those who
approached the nearest to His innocence and wisdom, sacrificed under
every aggravation of atrocity and variety of torture. The horrors of
the Mexican, the Peruvian, and the Indian superstitions are well
known.
NOTE ON HELLAS, BY MRS. SHELLEY.
The South of Europe was in a state of great political excitement at
the beginning of the year 1821. The Spanish Revolution had been a
signal to Italy; secrete societies were formed; and, when Naples rose
to declare the Constitution, the call was responded to from Brundusium
to the foot of the Alps. To crush these attempts to obtain liberty,
early in 1821 the Austrians poured their armies into the Peninsula: at
first their coming rather seemed to add energy and resolution to a
people long enslaved. The Piedmontese asserted their freedom; Genoa
threw off the yoke of the King of Sardinia; and, as if in playful
imitation, the people of the little state of Massa and Carrara gave
the conge to their sovereign, and set up a republic.
Tuscany alone was perfectly tranquil. It was said that the Austrian
minister presented a list of sixty Carbonari to the Grand Duke, urging
their imprisonment; and the Grand Duke replied, 'I do not know whether
these sixty men are Carbonari, but I know, if I imprison them, I shall
directly have sixty thousand start up. ' But, though the Tuscans had no
desire to disturb the paternal government beneath whose shelter they
slumbered, they regarded the progress of the various Italian
revolutions with intense interest, and hatred for the Austrian was
warm in every bosom. But they had slender hopes; they knew that the
Neapolitans would offer no fit resistance to the regular German
troops, and that the overthrow of the constitution in Naples would act
as a decisive blow against all struggles for liberty in Italy.
We have seen the rise and progress of reform. But the Holy Alliance
was alive and active in those days, and few could dream of the
peaceful triumph of liberty. It seemed then that the armed assertion
of freedom in the South of Europe was the only hope of the liberals,
as, if it prevailed, the nations of the north would imitate the
example. Happily the reverse has proved the fact. The countries
accustomed to the exercise of the privileges of freemen, to a limited
extent, have extended, and are extending, these limits. Freedom and
knowledge have now a chance of proceeding hand in hand; and, if it
continue thus, we may hope for the durability of both. Then, as I have
said--in 1821--Shelley, as well as every other lover of liberty,
looked upon the struggles in Spain and Italy as decisive of the
destinies of the world, probably for centuries to come. The interest
he took in the progress of affairs was intense. When Genoa declared
itself free, his hopes were at their highest. Day after day he read
the bulletins of the Austrian army, and sought eagerly to gather
tokens of its defeat. He heard of the revolt of Genoa with emotions of
transport. His whole heart and soul were in the triumph of the cause.
We were living at Pisa at that time; and several well-informed
Italians, at the head of whom we may place the celebrated Vacca, were
accustomed to seek for sympathy in their hopes from Shelley: they did
not find such for the despair they too generally experienced, founded
on contempt for their southern countrymen.
While the fate of the progress of the Austrian armies then invading
Naples was yet in suspense, the news of another revolution filled him
with exultation. We had formed the acquaintance at Pisa of several
Constantinopolitan Greeks, of the family of Prince Caradja, formerly
Hospodar of Wallachia; who, hearing that the bowstring, the accustomed
finale of his viceroyalty, was on the road to him, escaped with his
treasures, and took up his abode in Tuscany. Among these was the
gentleman to whom the drama of "Hellas" is dedicated. Prince
Mavrocordato was warmed by those aspirations for the independence of
his country which filled the hearts of many of his countrymen. He
often intimated the possibility of an insurrection in Greece; but we
had no idea of its being so near at hand, when, on the 1st of April
1821, he called on Shelley, bringing the proclamation of his cousin,
Prince Ypsilanti, and, radiant with exultation and delight, declared
that henceforth Greece would be free.
Shelley had hymned the dawn of liberty in Spain and Naples, in two
odes dictated by the warmest enthusiasm; he felt himself naturally
impelled to decorate with poetry the uprise of the descendants of that
people whose works he regarded with deep admiration, and to adopt the
vaticinatory character in prophesying their success. "Hellas" was
written in a moment of enthusiasm. It is curious to remark how well he
overcomes the difficulty of forming a drama out of such scant
materials. His prophecies, indeed, came true in their general, not
their particular, purport. He did not foresee the death of Lord
Londonderry, which was to be the epoch of a change in English
politics, particularly as regarded foreign affairs; nor that the navy
of his country would fight for instead of against the Greeks, and by
the battle of Navarino secure their enfranchisement from the Turks.
Almost against reason, as it appeared to him, he resolved to believe
that Greece would prove triumphant; and in this spirit, auguring
ultimate good, yet grieving over the vicissitudes to be endured in the
interval, he composed his drama.
"Hellas" was among the last of his compositions, and is among the most
beautiful. The choruses are singularly imaginative, and melodious in
their versification. There are some stanzas that beautifully exemplify
Shelley's peculiar style; as, for instance, the assertion of the
intellectual empire which must be for ever the inheritance of the
country of Homer, Sophocles, and Plato:--
'But Greece and her foundations are
Built below the tide of war,
Based on the crystalline sea
Of thought and its eternity. '
And again, that philosophical truth felicitously imaged forth--
'Revenge and Wrong bring forth their kind,
The foul cubs like their parents are,
Their den is in the guilty mind,
And Conscience feeds them with despair. '
The conclusion of the last chorus is among the most beautiful of his
lyrics. The imagery is distinct and majestic; the prophecy, such as
poets love to dwell upon, the Regeneration of Mankind--and that
regeneration reflecting back splendour on the foregone time, from
which it inherits so much of intellectual wealth, and memory of past
virtuous deeds, as must render the possession of happiness and peace
of tenfold value.
***
FRAGMENTS OF AN UNFINISHED DRAMA.
[Published in part (lines 1-69, 100-120) by Mrs. Shelley, "Posthumous
Poems", 1824; and again, with the notes, in "Poetical Works", 1839.
Lines 127-238 were printed by Dr.
When the crushed worm rebels beneath your tread,
The vultures and the dogs, your pensioners tame,
Are overgorged; but, like oppressors, still
They crave the relic of Destruction's feast.
The exhalations and the thirsty winds _430
Are sick with blood; the dew is foul with death;
Heaven's light is quenched in slaughter: thus, where'er
Upon your camps, cities, or towers, or fleets,
The obscene birds the reeking remnants cast
Of these dead limbs,--upon your streams and mountains, _435
Upon your fields, your gardens, and your housetops,
Where'er the winds shall creep, or the clouds fly,
Or the dews fall, or the angry sun look down
With poisoned light--Famine, and Pestilence,
And Panic, shall wage war upon our side! _440
Nature from all her boundaries is moved
Against ye: Time has found ye light as foam.
The Earth rebels; and Good and Evil stake
Their empire o'er the unborn world of men
On this one cast;--but ere the die be thrown, _445
The renovated genius of our race,
Proud umpire of the impious game, descends,
A seraph-winged Victory, bestriding
The tempest of the Omnipotence of God,
Which sweeps all things to their appointed doom, _450
And you to oblivion! '--More he would have said,
But--
NOTE:
_384 band edition 1822; bands editions 1839.
MAHMUD:
Died--as thou shouldst ore thy lips had painted
Their ruin in the hues of our success.
A rebel's crime, gilt with a rebel's tongue!
Your heart is Greek, Hassan.
HASSAN:
It may be so: _455
A spirit not my own wrenched me within,
And I have spoken words I fear and hate;
Yet would I die for--
MAHMUD:
Live! oh live! outlive
Me and this sinking empire. But the fleet--
HASSAN:
Alas! --
MAHMUD:
The fleet which, like a flock of clouds _460
Chased by the wind, flies the insurgent banner!
Our winged castles from their merchant ships!
Our myriads before their weak pirate bands!
Our arms before their chains! our years of empire
Before their centuries of servile fear! _465
Death is awake! Repulse is on the waters!
They own no more the thunder-bearing banner
Of Mahmud; but, like hounds of a base breed,
Gorge from a stranger's hand, and rend their master.
NOTE:
_466 Repulse is "Shelley, Errata", edition 1822; Repulsed edition 1822.
HASSAN:
Latmos, and Ampelos, and Phanae saw _470
The wreck--
MAHMUD:
The caves of the Icarian isles
Told each to the other in loud mockery,
And with the tongue as of a thousand echoes,
First of the sea-convulsing fight--and, then,--
Thou darest to speak--senseless are the mountains: _475
Interpret thou their voice!
NOTE:
_472 Told Errata, Wms. transcript; Hold edition 1822.
HASSAN:
My presence bore
A part in that day's shame. The Grecian fleet
Bore down at daybreak from the North, and hung
As multitudinous on the ocean line,
As cranes upon the cloudless Thracian wind. _480
Our squadron, convoying ten thousand men,
Was stretching towards Nauplia when the battle
Was kindled. --
First through the hail of our artillery
The agile Hydriote barks with press of sail _485
Dashed:--ship to ship, cannon to cannon, man
To man were grappled in the embrace of war,
Inextricable but by death or victory.
The tempest of the raging fight convulsed
To its crystalline depths that stainless sea, _490
And shook Heaven's roof of golden morning clouds,
Poised on an hundred azure mountain-isles.
In the brief trances of the artillery
One cry from the destroyed and the destroyer
Rose, and a cloud of desolation wrapped _495
The unforeseen event, till the north wind
Sprung from the sea, lifting the heavy veil
Of battle-smoke--then victory--victory!
For, as we thought, three frigates from Algiers
Bore down from Naxos to our aid, but soon _500
The abhorred cross glimmered behind, before,
Among, around us; and that fatal sign
Dried with its beams the strength in Moslem hearts,
As the sun drinks the dew. --What more? We fled! --
Our noonday path over the sanguine foam _505
Was beaconed,--and the glare struck the sun pale,--
By our consuming transports: the fierce light
Made all the shadows of our sails blood-red,
And every countenance blank. Some ships lay feeding
The ravening fire, even to the water's level; _510
Some were blown up; some, settling heavily,
Sunk; and the shrieks of our companions died
Upon the wind, that bore us fast and far,
Even after they were dead. Nine thousand perished!
We met the vultures legioned in the air _515
Stemming the torrent of the tainted wind;
They, screaming from their cloudy mountain-peaks,
Stooped through the sulphurous battle-smoke and perched
Each on the weltering carcase that we loved,
Like its ill angel or its damned soul, _520
Riding upon the bosom of the sea.
We saw the dog-fish hastening to their feast.
Joy waked the voiceless people of the sea,
And ravening Famine left his ocean cave
To dwell with War, with us, and with Despair. _525
We met night three hours to the west of Patmos,
And with night, tempest--
NOTES:
_503 in edition 1822; of editions 1839.
_527 And edition 1822; As editions 1839.
MAHMUD:
Cease!
[ENTER A MESSENGER. ]
MESSENGER:
Your Sublime Highness,
That Christian hound, the Muscovite Ambassador,
Has left the city. --If the rebel fleet
Had anchored in the port, had victory _530
Crowned the Greek legions in the Hippodrome,
Panic were tamer. --Obedience and Mutiny,
Like giants in contention planet-struck,
Stand gazing on each other. --There is peace
In Stamboul. --
MAHMUD:
Is the grave not calmer still? _535
Its ruins shall be mine.
HASSAN:
Fear not the Russian:
The tiger leagues not with the stag at bay
Against the hunter. --Cunning, base, and cruel,
He crouches, watching till the spoil be won,
And must be paid for his reserve in blood. _540
After the war is fought, yield the sleek Russian
That which thou canst not keep, his deserved portion
Of blood, which shall not flow through streets and fields,
Rivers and seas, like that which we may win,
But stagnate in the veins of Christian slaves! _545
[ENTER SECOND MESSENGER. ]
SECOND MESSENGER:
Nauplia, Tripolizza, Mothon, Athens,
Navarin, Artas, Monembasia,
Corinth, and Thebes are carried by assault,
And every Islamite who made his dogs
Fat with the flesh of Galilean slaves _550
Passed at the edge of the sword: the lust of blood,
Which made our warriors drunk, is quenched in death;
But like a fiery plague breaks out anew
In deeds which make the Christian cause look pale
In its own light. The garrison of Patras _555
Has store but for ten days, nor is there hope
But from the Briton: at once slave and tyrant,
His wishes still are weaker than his fears,
Or he would sell what faith may yet remain
From the oaths broke in Genoa and in Norway; _560
And if you buy him not, your treasury
Is empty even of promises--his own coin.
The freedman of a western poet-chief
Holds Attica with seven thousand rebels,
And has beat back the Pacha of Negropont: _565
The aged Ali sits in Yanina
A crownless metaphor of empire:
His name, that shadow of his withered might,
Holds our besieging army like a spell
In prey to famine, pest, and mutiny; _570
He, bastioned in his citadel, looks forth
Joyless upon the sapphire lake that mirrors
The ruins of the city where he reigned
Childless and sceptreless. The Greek has reaped
The costly harvest his own blood matured, _575
Not the sower, Ali--who has bought a truce
From Ypsilanti with ten camel-loads
Of Indian gold.
NOTE:
_563 freedman edition 1822; freeman editions 1839.
[ENTER A THIRD MESSENGER. ]
MAHMUD:
What more?
THIRD MESSENGER:
The Christian tribes
Of Lebanon and the Syrian wilderness
Are in revolt;--Damascus, Hems, Aleppo _580
Tremble;--the Arab menaces Medina,
The Aethiop has intrenched himself in Sennaar,
And keeps the Egyptian rebel well employed,
Who denies homage, claims investiture
As price of tardy aid. Persia demands _585
The cities on the Tigris, and the Georgians
Refuse their living tribute. Crete and Cyprus,
Like mountain-twins that from each other's veins
Catch the volcano-fire and earthquake-spasm,
Shake in the general fever. Through the city, _590
Like birds before a storm, the Santons shriek,
And prophesyings horrible and new
Are heard among the crowd: that sea of men
Sleeps on the wrecks it made, breathless and still.
A Dervise, learned in the Koran, preaches _595
That it is written how the sins of Islam
Must raise up a destroyer even now.
The Greeks expect a Saviour from the West,
Who shall not come, men say, in clouds and glory,
But in the omnipresence of that Spirit _600
In which all live and are. Ominous signs
Are blazoned broadly on the noonday sky:
One saw a red cross stamped upon the sun;
It has rained blood; and monstrous births declare
The secret wrath of Nature and her Lord. _605
The army encamped upon the Cydaris
Was roused last night by the alarm of battle,
And saw two hosts conflicting in the air,
The shadows doubtless of the unborn time
Cast on the mirror of the night. While yet _610
The fight hung balanced, there arose a storm
Which swept the phantoms from among the stars.
At the third watch the Spirit of the Plague
Was heard abroad flapping among the tents;
Those who relieved watch found the sentinels dead. _615
The last news from the camp is, that a thousand
Have sickened, and--
[ENTER A FOURTH MESSENGER. ]
MAHMUD:
And thou, pale ghost, dim shadow
Of some untimely rumour, speak!
FOURTH MESSENGER:
One comes
Fainting with toil, covered with foam and blood:
He stood, he says, on Chelonites' _620
Promontory, which o'erlooks the isles that groan
Under the Briton's frown, and all their waters
Then trembling in the splendour of the moon,
When as the wandering clouds unveiled or hid
Her boundless light, he saw two adverse fleets _625
Stalk through the night in the horizon's glimmer,
Mingling fierce thunders and sulphureous gleams,
And smoke which strangled every infant wind
That soothed the silver clouds through the deep air.
At length the battle slept, but the Sirocco _630
Awoke, and drove his flock of thunder-clouds
Over the sea-horizon, blotting out
All objects--save that in the faint moon-glimpse
He saw, or dreamed he saw, the Turkish admiral
And two the loftiest of our ships of war, _635
With the bright image of that Queen of Heaven,
Who hid, perhaps, her face for grief, reversed;
And the abhorred cross--
NOTE:
_620 on Chelonites']on Chelonites "Errata";
upon Clelonite's edition 1822;
upon Clelonit's editions 1839.
[ENTER AN ATTENDANT. ]
ATTENDANT:
Your Sublime Highness,
The Jew, who--
MAHMUD:
Could not come more seasonably:
Bid him attend. I'll hear no more! too long _640
We gaze on danger through the mist of fear,
And multiply upon our shattered hopes
The images of ruin. Come what will!
To-morrow and to-morrow are as lamps
Set in our path to light us to the edge _645
Through rough and smooth, nor can we suffer aught
Which He inflicts not in whose hand we are.
[EXEUNT. ]
SEMICHORUS 1:
Would I were the winged cloud
Of a tempest swift and loud!
I would scorn _650
The smile of morn
And the wave where the moonrise is born!
I would leave
The spirits of eve
A shroud for the corpse of the day to weave _655
From other threads than mine!
Bask in the deep blue noon divine.
Who would? Not I.
NOTE:
_657 the deep blue "Errata", Wms. transcript; the blue edition 1822.
SEMICHORUS 2:
Whither to fly?
SEMICHORUS 1:
Where the rocks that gird th' Aegean _660
Echo to the battle paean
Of the free--
I would flee
A tempestuous herald of victory!
My golden rain
For the Grecian slain _665
Should mingle in tears with the bloody main,
And my solemn thunder-knell
Should ring to the world the passing-bell
Of Tyranny! _670
SEMICHORUS 2:
Ah king! wilt thou chain
The rack and the rain?
Wilt thou fetter the lightning and hurricane?
The storms are free,
But we-- _675
CHORUS:
O Slavery! thou frost of the world's prime,
Killing its flowers and leaving its thorns bare!
Thy touch has stamped these limbs with crime,
These brows thy branding garland bear,
But the free heart, the impassive soul _680
Scorn thy control!
SEMICHORUS 1:
Let there be light! said Liberty,
And like sunrise from the sea,
Athens arose! --Around her born,
Shone like mountains in the morn _685
Glorious states;--and are they now
Ashes, wrecks, oblivion?
SEMICHORUS 2:
Go,
Where Thermae and Asopus swallowed
Persia, as the sand does foam:
Deluge upon deluge followed, _690
Discord, Macedon, and Rome:
And lastly thou!
SEMICHORUS 1:
Temples and towers,
Citadels and marts, and they
Who live and die there, have been ours,
And may be thine, and must decay; _695
But Greece and her foundations are
Built below the tide of war,
Based on the crystalline sea
Of thought and its eternity;
Her citizens, imperial spirits, _700
Rule the present from the past,
On all this world of men inherits
Their seal is set.
SEMICHORUS 2:
Hear ye the blast,
Whose Orphic thunder thrilling calls
From ruin her Titanian walls? _705
Whose spirit shakes the sapless bones
Of Slavery? Argos, Corinth, Crete
Hear, and from their mountain thrones
The daemons and the nymphs repeat
The harmony.
SEMICHORUS 1:
I hear! I hear! _710
SEMICHORUS 2:
The world's eyeless charioteer,
Destiny, is hurrying by!
What faith is crushed, what empire bleeds
Beneath her earthquake-footed steeds?
What eagle-winged victory sits _715
At her right hand? what shadow flits
Before? what splendour rolls behind?
Ruin and renovation cry
'Who but We? '
SEMICHORUS 1:
I hear! I hear!
The hiss as of a rushing wind, _720
The roar as of an ocean foaming,
The thunder as of earthquake coming.
I hear! I hear!
The crash as of an empire falling,
The shrieks as of a people calling _725
'Mercy! mercy! '--How they thrill!
Then a shout of 'kill! kill! kill! '
And then a small still voice, thus--
SEMICHORUS 2:
For
Revenge and Wrong bring forth their kind,
The foul cubs like their parents are, _730
Their den is in the guilty mind,
And Conscience feeds them with despair.
NOTE:
_728 For edition 1822, Wms. transcript;
Fear cj. Fleay, Forman, Dowden. See Editor's Note.
SEMICHORUS 1:
In sacred Athens, near the fane
Of Wisdom, Pity's altar stood:
Serve not the unknown God in vain. _735
But pay that broken shrine again,
Love for hate and tears for blood.
[ENTER MAHMUD AND AHASUERUS. ]
MAHMUD:
Thou art a man, thou sayest, even as we.
AHASUERUS:
No more!
MAHMUD:
But raised above thy fellow-men
By thought, as I by power.
AHASUERUS:
Thou sayest so. _740
MAHMUD:
Thou art an adept in the difficult lore
Of Greek and Frank philosophy; thou numberest
The flowers, and thou measurest the stars;
Thou severest element from element;
Thy spirit is present in the Past, and sees _745
The birth of this old world through all its cycles
Of desolation and of loveliness,
And when man was not, and how man became
The monarch and the slave of this low sphere,
And all its narrow circles--it is much-- _750
I honour thee, and would be what thou art
Were I not what I am; but the unborn hour,
Cradled in fear and hope, conflicting storms,
Who shall unveil? Nor thou, nor I, nor any
Mighty or wise. I apprehended not _755
What thou hast taught me, but I now perceive
That thou art no interpreter of dreams;
Thou dost not own that art, device, or God,
Can make the Future present--let it come!
Moreover thou disdainest us and ours; _760
Thou art as God, whom thou contemplatest.
AHASUERUS:
Disdain thee? --not the worm beneath thy feet!
The Fathomless has care for meaner things
Than thou canst dream, and has made pride for those
Who would be what they may not, or would seem _765
That which they are not. Sultan! talk no more
Of thee and me, the Future and the Past;
But look on that which cannot change--the One,
The unborn and the undying. Earth and ocean,
Space, and the isles of life or light that gem _770
The sapphire floods of interstellar air,
This firmament pavilioned upon chaos,
With all its cressets of immortal fire,
Whose outwall, bastioned impregnably
Against the escape of boldest thoughts, repels them _775
As Calpe the Atlantic clouds--this Whole
Of suns, and worlds, and men, and beasts, and flowers,
With all the silent or tempestuous workings
By which they have been, are, or cease to be,
Is but a vision;--all that it inherits _780
Are motes of a sick eye, bubbles and dreams;
Thought is its cradle and its grave, nor less
The Future and the Past are idle shadows
Of thought's eternal flight--they have no being:
Nought is but that which feels itself to be. _785
NOTE:
_762 thy edition 1822; my editions 1839.
MAHMUD:
What meanest thou? Thy words stream like a tempest
Of dazzling mist within my brain--they shake
The earth on which I stand, and hang like night
On Heaven above me. What can they avail?
They cast on all things surest, brightest, best, _790
Doubt, insecurity, astonishment.
AHASUERUS:
Mistake me not! All is contained in each.
Dodona's forest to an acorn's cup
Is that which has been, or will be, to that
Which is--the absent to the present. Thought _795
Alone, and its quick elements, Will, Passion,
Reason, Imagination, cannot die;
They are, what that which they regard appears,
The stuff whence mutability can weave
All that it hath dominion o'er, worlds, worms, _800
Empires, and superstitions. What has thought
To do with time, or place, or circumstance?
Wouldst thou behold the Future? --ask and have!
Knock and it shall be opened--look, and lo!
The coming age is shadowed on the Past _805
As on a glass.
MAHMUD:
Wild, wilder thoughts convulse
My spirit--Did not Mahomet the Second
Win Stamboul?
AHASUERUS:
Thou wouldst ask that giant spirit
The written fortunes of thy house and faith.
Thou wouldst cite one out of the grave to tell _810
How what was born in blood must die.
MAHMUD:
Thy words
Have power on me! I see--
AHASUERUS:
What hearest thou?
MAHMUD:
A far whisper--
Terrible silence.
AHASUERUS:
What succeeds?
MAHMUD:
The sound
As of the assault of an imperial city, _815
The hiss of inextinguishable fire,
The roar of giant cannon; the earthquaking
Fall of vast bastions and precipitous towers,
The shock of crags shot from strange enginery,
The clash of wheels, and clang of armed hoofs, _820
And crash of brazen mail as of the wreck
Of adamantine mountains--the mad blast
Of trumpets, and the neigh of raging steeds,
The shrieks of women whose thrill jars the blood,
And one sweet laugh, most horrible to hear, _825
As of a joyous infant waked and playing
With its dead mother's breast, and now more loud
The mingled battle-cry,--ha! hear I not
'En touto nike! ' 'Allah-illa-Allah! '?
AHASUERUS:
The sulphurous mist is raised--thou seest--
MAHMUD:
A chasm, _830
As of two mountains in the wall of Stamboul;
And in that ghastly breach the Islamites,
Like giants on the ruins of a world,
Stand in the light of sunrise. In the dust
Glimmers a kingless diadem, and one _835
Of regal port has cast himself beneath
The stream of war. Another proudly clad
In golden arms spurs a Tartarian barb
Into the gap, and with his iron mace
Directs the torrent of that tide of men, _840
And seems--he is--Mahomet!
AHASUERUS:
What thou seest
Is but the ghost of thy forgotten dream.
A dream itself, yet less, perhaps, than that
Thou call'st reality. Thou mayst behold
How cities, on which Empire sleeps enthroned, _845
Bow their towered crests to mutability.
Poised by the flood, e'en on the height thou holdest,
Thou mayst now learn how the full tide of power
Ebbs to its depths. --Inheritor of glory,
Conceived in darkness, born in blood, and nourished _850
With tears and toil, thou seest the mortal throes
Of that whose birth was but the same. The Past
Now stands before thee like an Incarnation
Of the To-come; yet wouldst thou commune with
That portion of thyself which was ere thou _855
Didst start for this brief race whose crown is death,
Dissolve with that strong faith and fervent passion
Which called it from the uncreated deep,
Yon cloud of war, with its tempestuous phantoms
Of raging death; and draw with mighty will _860
The imperial shade hither.
[EXIT AHASUERUS. ]
[THE PHANTOM OF MAHOMET THE SECOND APPEARS. ]
MAHMUD:
Approach!
PHANTOM:
I come
Thence whither thou must go! The grave is fitter
To take the living than give up the dead;
Yet has thy faith prevailed, and I am here.
The heavy fragments of the power which fell _865
When I arose, like shapeless crags and clouds,
Hang round my throne on the abyss, and voices
Of strange lament soothe my supreme repose,
Wailing for glory never to return. --
A later Empire nods in its decay: _870
The autumn of a greener faith is come,
And wolfish change, like winter, howls to strip
The foliage in which Fame, the eagle, built
Her aerie, while Dominion whelped below.
The storm is in its branches, and the frost _875
Is on its leaves, and the blank deep expects
Oblivion on oblivion, spoil on spoil,
Ruin on ruin:--Thou art slow, my son;
The Anarchs of the world of darkness keep
A throne for thee, round which thine empire lies _880
Boundless and mute; and for thy subjects thou,
Like us, shalt rule the ghosts of murdered life,
The phantoms of the powers who rule thee now--
Mutinous passions, and conflicting fears,
And hopes that sate themselves on dust, and die! -- _885
Stripped of their mortal strength, as thou of thine.
Islam must fall, but we will reign together
Over its ruins in the world of death:--
And if the trunk be dry, yet shall the seed
Unfold itself even in the shape of that _890
Which gathers birth in its decay. Woe! woe!
To the weak people tangled in the grasp
Of its last spasms.
MAHMUD:
Spirit, woe to all!
Woe to the wronged and the avenger! Woe
To the destroyer, woe to the destroyed! _895
Woe to the dupe, and woe to the deceiver!
Woe to the oppressed, and woe to the oppressor!
Woe both to those that suffer and inflict;
Those who are born and those who die!
but say,
Imperial shadow of the thing I am, _900
When, how, by whom, Destruction must accomplish
Her consummation!
PHANTOM:
Ask the cold pale Hour,
Rich in reversion of impending death,
When HE shall fall upon whose ripe gray hairs
Sit Care, and Sorrow, and Infirmity-- _905
The weight which Crime, whose wings are plumed with years,
Leaves in his flight from ravaged heart to heart
Over the heads of men, under which burthen
They bow themselves unto the grave: fond wretch!
He leans upon his crutch, and talks of years _910
To come, and how in hours of youth renewed
He will renew lost joys, and--
VOICE WITHOUT:
Victory! Victory!
[THE PHANTOM VANISHES. ]
MAHMUD:
What sound of the importunate earth has broken
My mighty trance?
VOICE WITHOUT:
Victory! Victory!
MAHMUD:
Weak lightning before darkness! poor faint smile _915
Of dying Islam! Voice which art the response
Of hollow weakness! Do I wake and live?
Were there such things, or may the unquiet brain,
Vexed by the wise mad talk of the old Jew,
Have shaped itself these shadows of its fear? _920
It matters not! --for nought we see or dream,
Possess, or lose, or grasp at, can be worth
More than it gives or teaches. Come what may,
The Future must become the Past, and I
As they were to whom once this present hour, _925
This gloomy crag of time to which I cling,
Seemed an Elysian isle of peace and joy
Never to be attained. --I must rebuke
This drunkenness of triumph ere it die,
And dying, bring despair. Victory! poor slaves! _930
[EXIT MAHMUD. ]
VOICE WITHOUT:
Shout in the jubilee of death! The Greeks
Are as a brood of lions in the net
Round which the kingly hunters of the earth
Stand smiling. Anarchs, ye whose daily food
Are curses, groans, and gold, the fruit of death, _935
From Thule to the girdle of the world,
Come, feast! the board groans with the flesh of men;
The cup is foaming with a nation's blood,
Famine and Thirst await! eat, drink, and die!
SEMICHORUS 1:
Victorious Wrong, with vulture scream, _940
Salutes the rising sun, pursues the flying day!
I saw her, ghastly as a tyrant's dream,
Perch on the trembling pyramid of night,
Beneath which earth and all her realms pavilioned lay
In visions of the dawning undelight. _945
Who shall impede her flight?
Who rob her of her prey?
VOICE WITHOUT:
Victory! Victory! Russia's famished eagles
Dare not to prey beneath the crescent's light.
Impale the remnant of the Greeks! despoil! _950
Violate! make their flesh cheaper than dust!
SEMICHORUS 2:
Thou voice which art
The herald of the ill in splendour hid!
Thou echo of the hollow heart
Of monarchy, bear me to thine abode _955
When desolation flashes o'er a world destroyed:
Oh, bear me to those isles of jagged cloud
Which float like mountains on the earthquake, mid
The momentary oceans of the lightning,
Or to some toppling promontory proud _960
Of solid tempest whose black pyramid,
Riven, overhangs the founts intensely bright'ning
Of those dawn-tinted deluges of fire
Before their waves expire,
When heaven and earth are light, and only light _965
In the thunder-night!
NOTE:
_958 earthquake edition 1822; earthquakes editions 1839.
VOICE WITHOUT:
Victory! Victory! Austria, Russia, England,
And that tame serpent, that poor shadow, France,
Cry peace, and that means death when monarchs speak.
Ho, there! bring torches, sharpen those red stakes, _970
These chains are light, fitter for slaves and poisoners
Than Greeks. Kill! plunder! burn! let none remain.
SEMICHORUS 1:
Alas! for Liberty!
If numbers, wealth, or unfulfilling years,
Or fate, can quell the free! _975
Alas! for Virtue, when
Torments, or contumely, or the sneers
Of erring judging men
Can break the heart where it abides.
Alas! if Love, whose smile makes this obscure world splendid, _980
Can change with its false times and tides,
Like hope and terror,--
Alas for Love!
And Truth, who wanderest lone and unbefriended,
If thou canst veil thy lie-consuming mirror _985
Before the dazzled eyes of Error,
Alas for thee! Image of the Above.
SEMICHORUS 2:
Repulse, with plumes from conquest torn,
Led the ten thousand from the limits of the morn
Through many an hostile Anarchy! _990
At length they wept aloud, and cried, 'The Sea! the Sea! '
Through exile, persecution, and despair,
Rome was, and young Atlantis shall become
The wonder, or the terror, or the tomb
Of all whose step wakes Power lulled in her savage lair: _995
But Greece was as a hermit-child,
Whose fairest thoughts and limbs were built
To woman's growth, by dreams so mild,
She knew not pain or guilt;
And now, O Victory, blush! and Empire, tremble _1000
When ye desert the free--
If Greece must be
A wreck, yet shall its fragments reassemble,
And build themselves again impregnably
In a diviner clime, _1005
To Amphionic music on some Cape sublime,
Which frowns above the idle foam of Time.
SEMICHORUS 1:
Let the tyrants rule the desert they have made;
Let the free possess the Paradise they claim;
Be the fortune of our fierce oppressors weighed _1010
With our ruin, our resistance, and our name!
SEMICHORUS 2:
Our dead shall be the seed of their decay,
Our survivors be the shadow of their pride,
Our adversity a dream to pass away--
Their dishonour a remembrance to abide! _1015
VOICE WITHOUT:
Victory! Victory! The bought Briton sends
The keys of ocean to the Islamite. --
Now shall the blazon of the cross be veiled,
And British skill directing Othman might,
Thunder-strike rebel victory. Oh, keep holy _1020
This jubilee of unrevenged blood!
Kill! crush! despoil! Let not a Greek escape!
SEMICHORUS 1:
Darkness has dawned in the East
On the noon of time:
The death-birds descend to their feast _1025
From the hungry clime.
Let Freedom and Peace flee far
To a sunnier strand,
And follow Love's folding-star
To the Evening land! _1030
SEMICHORUS 2:
The young moon has fed
Her exhausted horn
With the sunset's fire:
The weak day is dead,
But the night is not born; _1035
And, like loveliness panting with wild desire
While it trembles with fear and delight,
Hesperus flies from awakening night,
And pants in its beauty and speed with light
Fast-flashing, soft, and bright. _1040
Thou beacon of love! thou lamp of the free!
Guide us far, far away,
To climes where now veiled by the ardour of day
Thou art hidden
From waves on which weary Noon _1045
Faints in her summer swoon,
Between kingless continents sinless as Eden,
Around mountains and islands inviolably
Pranked on the sapphire sea.
SEMICHORUS 1:
Through the sunset of hope, _1050
Like the shapes of a dream.
What Paradise islands of glory gleam!
Beneath Heaven's cope,
Their shadows more clear float by--
The sound of their oceans, the light of their sky, _1055
The music and fragrance their solitudes breathe
Burst, like morning on dream, or like Heaven on death,
Through the walls of our prison;
And Greece, which was dead, is arisen!
NOTE:
_1057 dream edition 1822; dreams editions 1839.
CHORUS:
The world's great age begins anew, _1060
The golden years return,
The earth doth like a snake renew
Her winter weeds outworn:
Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam,
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream. _1065
A brighter Hellas rears its mountains
From waves serener far;
A new Peneus rolls his fountains
Against the morning star.
Where fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep _1070
Young Cyclads on a sunnier deep.
A loftier Argo cleaves the main,
Fraught with a later prize;
Another Orpheus sings again,
And loves, and weeps, and dies. _1075
A new Ulysses leaves once more
Calypso for his native shore.
Oh, write no more the tale of Troy,
If earth Death's scroll must be!
Nor mix with Laian rage the joy _1080
Which dawns upon the free:
Although a subtler Sphinx renew
Riddles of death Thebes never knew.
Another Athens shall arise,
And to remoter time _1085
Bequeath, like sunset to the skies,
The splendour of its prime;
And leave, if nought so bright may live,
All earth can take or Heaven can give.
Saturn and Love their long repose _1090
Shall burst, more bright and good
Than all who fell, than One who rose,
Than many unsubdued:
Not gold, not blood, their altar dowers,
But votive tears and symbol flowers. _1095
Oh, cease! must hate and death return?
Cease! must men kill and die?
Cease! drain not to its dregs the urn
Of bitter prophecy.
The world is weary of the past, _1100
Oh, might it die or rest at last!
NOTES:
_1068 his edition 1822; its editions 1839.
_1072 Argo]Argos edition 1822.
_1091-_1093 See Editor's note.
_1091 bright editions 1839; wise edition 1829 (ed. Galignani).
_1093 unsubdued editions 1839; unwithstood edition 1829 (ed. Galignani).
NOTES.
(1) THE QUENCHLESS ASHES OF MILAN [L. 60].
Milan was the centre of the resistance of the Lombard league against
the Austrian tyrant. Frederic Barbarossa burnt the city to the ground,
but liberty lived in its ashes, and it rose like an exhalation from
its ruin. See Sismondi's "Histoire des Republiques Italiennes", a book
which has done much towards awakening the Italians to an imitation of
their great ancestors.
(2) THE CHORUS [L. 197].
The popular notions of Christianity are represented in this chorus as
true in their relation to the worship they superseded, and that which
in all probability they will supersede, without considering their
merits in a relation more universal. The first stanza contrasts the
immortality of the living and thinking beings which inhabit the
planets, and to use a common and inadequate phrase, "clothe themselves
in matter", with the transience of the noblest manifestations of the
external world.
The concluding verses indicate a progressive state of more or loss
exalted existence, according to the degree of perfection which every
distinct intelligence may have attained. Let it not be supposed that I
mean to dogmatise upon a subject, concerning which all men are equally
ignorant, or that I think the Gordian knot of the origin of evil can
be disentangled by that or any similar assertions. The received
hypothesis of a Being resembling men in the moral attributes of His
nature, having called us out of non-existence, and after inflicting on
us the misery of the commission of error, should superadd that of the
punishment and the privations consequent upon it, still would remain
inexplicable and incredible. That there is a true solution of the
riddle, and that in our present state that solution is unattainable by
us, are propositions which may be regarded as equally certain:
meanwhile, as it is the province of the poet to attach himself to
those ideas which exalt and ennoble humanity, let him be permitted to
have conjectured the condition of that futurity towards which we are
all impelled by an inextinguishable thirst for immortality. Until
better arguments can be produced than sophisms which disgrace the
cause, this desire itself must remain the strongest and the only
presumption that eternity is the inheritance of every thinking being.
(3) NO HOARY PRIESTS AFTER THAT PATRIARCH [L. 245].
The Greek Patriarch, after haying been compelled to fulminate an
anathema against the insurgents, was put to death by the Turks.
Fortunately the Greeks have been taught that they cannot buy security
by degradation, and the Turks, though equally cruel, are less cunning
than the smooth-faced tyrants of Europe. As to the anathema, his
Holiness might as well have thrown his mitre at Mount Athos for any
effect that it produced. The chiefs of the Greeks are almost all men
of comprehension and enlightened views on religion and politics.
(4) THE FREEDMAN OF A WESTERN POET-CHIEF [L. 563].
A Greek who had been Lord Byron's servant commands the insurgents in
Attica. This Greek, Lord Byron informs me, though a poet and an
enthusiastic patriot, gave him rather the idea of a timid and
unenterprising person. It appears that circumstances make men what
they are, and that we all contain the germ of a degree of degradation
or of greatness whose connection with our character is determined by
events.
(5) THE GREEKS EXPECT A SAVIOUR FROM THE WEST [L. 598].
It is reported that this Messiah had arrived at a seaport near
Lacedaemon in an American brig. The association of names and ideas is
irresistibly ludicrous, but the prevalence of such a rumour strongly
marks the state of popular enthusiasm in Greece.
(6) THE SOUND AS OF THE ASSAULT OF AN IMPERIAL CITY [LL. 814-15].
For the vision of Mahmud of the taking of Constantinople in 1453, see
Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", volume 12 page 223.
The manner of the invocation of the spirit of Mahomet the Second will
be censured as over subtle. I could easily have made the Jew a regular
conjuror, and the Phantom an ordinary ghost. I have preferred to
represent the Jew as disclaiming all pretension, or even belief, in
supernatural agency, and as tempting Mahmud to that state of mind in
which ideas may be supposed to assume the force of sensations through
the confusion of thought with the objects of thought, and the excess
of passion animating the creations of imagination.
It is a sort of natural magic, susceptible of being exercised in a
degree by any one who should have made himself master of the secret
associations of another's thoughts.
(7) THE CHORUS [L. 1060].
The final chorus is indistinct and obscure, as the event of the living
drama whose arrival it foretells. Prophecies of wars, and rumours of
wars, etc. , may safely be made by poet or prophet in any age, but to
anticipate however darkly a period of regeneration and happiness is a
more hazardous exercise of the faculty which bards possess or feign.
It will remind the reader 'magno NEC proximus intervallo' of Isaiah
and Virgil, whose ardent spirits overleaping the actual reign of evil
which we endure and bewail, already saw the possible and perhaps
approaching state of society in which the 'lion shall lie down with
the lamb,' and 'omnis feret omnia tellus. ' Let these great names be my
authority and my excuse.
(8) SATURN AND LOVE THEIR LONG REPOSE SHALL BURST [L. 1090].
Saturn and Love were among the deities of a real or imaginary state of
innocence and happiness. ALL those WHO FELL, or the Gods of Greece,
Asia, and Egypt; the ONE WHO ROSE, or Jesus Christ, at whose
appearance the idols of the Pagan World wore amerced of their worship;
and the MANY UNSUBDUED, or the monstrous objects of the idolatry of
China, India, the Antarctic islands, and the native tribes of America,
certainly have reigned over the understandings of men in conjunction
or in succession, during periods in which all we know of evil has been
in a state of portentous, and, until the revival of learning and the
arts, perpetually increasing, activity. The Grecian gods seem indeed
to have been personally more innocent, although it cannot be said,
that as far as temperance and chastity are concerned, they gave so
edifying an example as their successor. The sublime human character of
Jesus Christ was deformed by an imputed identification with a Power,
who tempted, betrayed, and punished the innocent beings who were
called into existence by His sole will; and for the period of a
thousand years, the spirit of this most just, wise, and benevolent of
men has been propitiated with myriads of hecatombs of those who
approached the nearest to His innocence and wisdom, sacrificed under
every aggravation of atrocity and variety of torture. The horrors of
the Mexican, the Peruvian, and the Indian superstitions are well
known.
NOTE ON HELLAS, BY MRS. SHELLEY.
The South of Europe was in a state of great political excitement at
the beginning of the year 1821. The Spanish Revolution had been a
signal to Italy; secrete societies were formed; and, when Naples rose
to declare the Constitution, the call was responded to from Brundusium
to the foot of the Alps. To crush these attempts to obtain liberty,
early in 1821 the Austrians poured their armies into the Peninsula: at
first their coming rather seemed to add energy and resolution to a
people long enslaved. The Piedmontese asserted their freedom; Genoa
threw off the yoke of the King of Sardinia; and, as if in playful
imitation, the people of the little state of Massa and Carrara gave
the conge to their sovereign, and set up a republic.
Tuscany alone was perfectly tranquil. It was said that the Austrian
minister presented a list of sixty Carbonari to the Grand Duke, urging
their imprisonment; and the Grand Duke replied, 'I do not know whether
these sixty men are Carbonari, but I know, if I imprison them, I shall
directly have sixty thousand start up. ' But, though the Tuscans had no
desire to disturb the paternal government beneath whose shelter they
slumbered, they regarded the progress of the various Italian
revolutions with intense interest, and hatred for the Austrian was
warm in every bosom. But they had slender hopes; they knew that the
Neapolitans would offer no fit resistance to the regular German
troops, and that the overthrow of the constitution in Naples would act
as a decisive blow against all struggles for liberty in Italy.
We have seen the rise and progress of reform. But the Holy Alliance
was alive and active in those days, and few could dream of the
peaceful triumph of liberty. It seemed then that the armed assertion
of freedom in the South of Europe was the only hope of the liberals,
as, if it prevailed, the nations of the north would imitate the
example. Happily the reverse has proved the fact. The countries
accustomed to the exercise of the privileges of freemen, to a limited
extent, have extended, and are extending, these limits. Freedom and
knowledge have now a chance of proceeding hand in hand; and, if it
continue thus, we may hope for the durability of both. Then, as I have
said--in 1821--Shelley, as well as every other lover of liberty,
looked upon the struggles in Spain and Italy as decisive of the
destinies of the world, probably for centuries to come. The interest
he took in the progress of affairs was intense. When Genoa declared
itself free, his hopes were at their highest. Day after day he read
the bulletins of the Austrian army, and sought eagerly to gather
tokens of its defeat. He heard of the revolt of Genoa with emotions of
transport. His whole heart and soul were in the triumph of the cause.
We were living at Pisa at that time; and several well-informed
Italians, at the head of whom we may place the celebrated Vacca, were
accustomed to seek for sympathy in their hopes from Shelley: they did
not find such for the despair they too generally experienced, founded
on contempt for their southern countrymen.
While the fate of the progress of the Austrian armies then invading
Naples was yet in suspense, the news of another revolution filled him
with exultation. We had formed the acquaintance at Pisa of several
Constantinopolitan Greeks, of the family of Prince Caradja, formerly
Hospodar of Wallachia; who, hearing that the bowstring, the accustomed
finale of his viceroyalty, was on the road to him, escaped with his
treasures, and took up his abode in Tuscany. Among these was the
gentleman to whom the drama of "Hellas" is dedicated. Prince
Mavrocordato was warmed by those aspirations for the independence of
his country which filled the hearts of many of his countrymen. He
often intimated the possibility of an insurrection in Greece; but we
had no idea of its being so near at hand, when, on the 1st of April
1821, he called on Shelley, bringing the proclamation of his cousin,
Prince Ypsilanti, and, radiant with exultation and delight, declared
that henceforth Greece would be free.
Shelley had hymned the dawn of liberty in Spain and Naples, in two
odes dictated by the warmest enthusiasm; he felt himself naturally
impelled to decorate with poetry the uprise of the descendants of that
people whose works he regarded with deep admiration, and to adopt the
vaticinatory character in prophesying their success. "Hellas" was
written in a moment of enthusiasm. It is curious to remark how well he
overcomes the difficulty of forming a drama out of such scant
materials. His prophecies, indeed, came true in their general, not
their particular, purport. He did not foresee the death of Lord
Londonderry, which was to be the epoch of a change in English
politics, particularly as regarded foreign affairs; nor that the navy
of his country would fight for instead of against the Greeks, and by
the battle of Navarino secure their enfranchisement from the Turks.
Almost against reason, as it appeared to him, he resolved to believe
that Greece would prove triumphant; and in this spirit, auguring
ultimate good, yet grieving over the vicissitudes to be endured in the
interval, he composed his drama.
"Hellas" was among the last of his compositions, and is among the most
beautiful. The choruses are singularly imaginative, and melodious in
their versification. There are some stanzas that beautifully exemplify
Shelley's peculiar style; as, for instance, the assertion of the
intellectual empire which must be for ever the inheritance of the
country of Homer, Sophocles, and Plato:--
'But Greece and her foundations are
Built below the tide of war,
Based on the crystalline sea
Of thought and its eternity. '
And again, that philosophical truth felicitously imaged forth--
'Revenge and Wrong bring forth their kind,
The foul cubs like their parents are,
Their den is in the guilty mind,
And Conscience feeds them with despair. '
The conclusion of the last chorus is among the most beautiful of his
lyrics. The imagery is distinct and majestic; the prophecy, such as
poets love to dwell upon, the Regeneration of Mankind--and that
regeneration reflecting back splendour on the foregone time, from
which it inherits so much of intellectual wealth, and memory of past
virtuous deeds, as must render the possession of happiness and peace
of tenfold value.
***
FRAGMENTS OF AN UNFINISHED DRAMA.
[Published in part (lines 1-69, 100-120) by Mrs. Shelley, "Posthumous
Poems", 1824; and again, with the notes, in "Poetical Works", 1839.
Lines 127-238 were printed by Dr.
